Leading economists that have had active roles in earlier
presidential administrations from both the Democratic and
Republican parties co-hosted a panel in New York on Monday, and
each agreed that the current White House could enact a number of
measures to keep the economy from spiraling out of control.

Speaking at a Thomson Reuters Newsmaker event this week, David
Stockman and Peter Orszag both said the US could save tremendously
if it shifted spending away from the Pentagon, ending the trend of
dumping a large chunk of the federal budget on maintaining overseas
military bases and lengthy occupations.

Stockman, who was budget director from 1981 to 1985 under
Republican Ronald Reagan, is considered by Reuters to be “a key
architect of tax-cutting policies” enacted during that
administration. And although Peter— a former budget director for
Democrat President Barack Obama — comes from the other side of the
aisle, both say military spending should be slashed to save the
country.

“We ought to go back to [President Dwight] Eisenhower’s
standard on defense,” Stockman said during the discussion. In
1960, he said, Eisenhower closed out his presidency by warning
Congress that continuous spending aimed at the Pentagon would feed
and foster the military industrial complex that exists today.

“Go back to that,” said Stockman. “We could save two
trillion dollars over the next 10 years simply by going back to the
Eisenhower standard: Getting out of this imperial foreign policy of
invasion and occupation; demobilize our forces.”

Stockman said that having one-and-a-half million service members
in the Armed Forces is “ridiculous,” and that the US could
sustain with a military less than one-third of that. “Why do we
have a million in our reserves in National Guard?” he asked.
“We are spending a quarter of a trillion dollars a year just on
manpower and benefits just for all of those people I’ve mentioned,
and we have no industrial enemies anywhere in the world.”

Orszag failed to go into as great of detail as Stockman in terms
of defense spending, instead emphasizing that scaling back Social
Security payments and ending income tax cuts could best solve the
country’s financial woes.

“Orszag says governments are right to use spending to stretch
out the economic adjustments to keep large segments of population
from losing their jobs, which itself can cause long-lasting
problems,” reports Reuters.

That isn’t to say, however, that he shied away from taking an
axe to the Defense Department’s budget in the past. After leaving
the Obama White House, he authored an op-ed for Bloomberg News in
2012 where he outlined ways to pinch pennies by giving Uncle Sam
less to work with.

“In the abstract, reducing defense costs seems pretty simple:
Just cut back on some of the really expensive equipment,”
Orszag wrote. “The cost of building the F-35 fighter, for
example, has been estimated at more than $100 million per plane.
The new littoral combat ship, designed to operate in coastal
regions, is projected to cost about $600 million per ship.”

But one year later, those F-35s continue to represent not just a
large sum of the country’s spending, but an awfully large headache
as well: after a laundry list of incidents, the fighter jets are
expected to eventually cost a total of $1 trillion to develop,
purchase and maintain until the year 2050.